Mark Moyar

Dr. Mark Moyar (born 1971) became a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in 2015.^[1] He joined the Joint Special Operations University in 2013 as a Senior Fellow. Previously he was Director of Research at Orbis Operations which he joined in July 2010 after serving as a professor at the Marine Corps University where he held the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism.^[2] Moyar is known for his writing on the Vietnam War.

Early life

Moyar was born May 12, 1971 in Cleveland, Ohio to Bert and Marjorie Moyar. He has two siblings; David Moyar and Dean Moyar. He graduated from Hawken School in Gates Mills, Ohio in 1989.

Education

Moyar holds a B.A. summa cum laude in history from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in history from Cambridge University. His articles on historical and current events have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

Moyar is the author of the 2006 book Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965, a history that is considered revisionist by many American historians. In it he argues that Ngo Dinh Diem was an effective leader. Moyar states that supporting the November 1963 coup was one of the worst American mistakes of the war. The other biggest mistakes according to Moyar were: the failure to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail, and the United States Congress' refusal to support the South Vietnamese government after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords were violated, and the refusal of emergency aid to South Vietnam near the end of the war.

Triumph Forsaken caused a great stir and many opinionated reviews, some negative, as well as some positive. In response to the reactions engendered by the book, Andrew Wiest and Michael J. Doidge edited Triumph revisited : historians battle for the Vietnam War (2010), a collection of detailed reviews of the book by 15 different academic historians. The reviews are attached to responses by Moyar, who challenges the criticism of his work.

Books

• Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: The CIA's Secret Campaign to Destroy the Viet Cong (1997) ISBN 1-55750-593-4
  • Republished in 2007 as Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam with a foreword by Harry Summers and a new preface and chapter; ISBN 0-8032-1602-5
• Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (2006) ISBN 0-521-86911-0
• A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq (2009) ISBN 0-300-15276-0
• Strategic Failure: How President Obama's Drone Warfare, Defense Cuts, and Military Amateurism Have Imperiled America (2015) ISBN 1-4767-1324-3

References

External links

• Book website
• Interview on A Question of Command at the Pritzker Military Museum & Library
• Interview on "Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965" on CSPAN
• Interview on "Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965" on History News Network